September 14, 1997

By JAMES SAYNOR

here's something more than a little spooky about the Internet, whose boundless, siteless quality suggests an intimidating, all-seeing consciousness. Perhaps that
vast cosmos of data has plans for us. Maybe one day it will swallow us up -- minds, personal identities, credit-card numbers and all -- in a manner more scary than anything the electric brains managed in ''Nineteen Eighty-four''
or ''2001.'' The Indian writer and anthropologist Amitav Ghosh's new novel, ''The Calcutta Chromosome,'' begins by gently tapping into such fears, then broadens into a mind-boggling conspiracy
saga in which everyone seems a puppet in a huge marionette show or an icon on some demigod's video display terminal.

Early in the 21st century, an Egyptian named Antar jiggles data in his at-home work station. He's a low-level computer programmer for an ominous global organization that tracks the world's water supplies, and he lives in a tumbledown, depopulated
Manhattan (where, unsurprisingly, rent control still survives). An image of a damaged ID card pops up, unbidden, on his screen, and his domineering computer demands that he account for it. The card belongs to a former colleague, an Indian
called Murugan, who vanished in Calcutta in 1995 while pursuing a cranky obsession with Sir Ronald Ross -- the British Army doctor who, in the Calcutta of the 1890's, first showed that malaria was carried by mosquitoes.

The premise of the novel proceeds some way on from this, revealed through Antar's long, remembered exchanges with the loquacious Murugan, who holds forth in a tiresome gumshoe patter, like a bad parody of a 1940's movie. Murugan's belief
is that Ross -- by his account a fairly dim, dilettante scientist -- was led down the garden path of discovery by a sinister cabal of folk-medicine experts, who used his research to seek an elixir of life, a means by which, through the
mosquito, one person's soul could hop over into the body of another.

Given that this theory seems completely mad and that no one else believes it, the reader assumes there must be something to it. By way of flashbacks to Murugan's 1995 disappearance, long memoirs pulled from cyberspace and odd conjunctions involving
an array of characters across three centuries, a giant story-puzzle emerges. Its central question, though, is fairly basic: who's been bitten by the bug?

THE more that Antar and Murugan hunt for the center of the maze, the more it's clear that the center of the maze is also hunting them. Almost every sentence in the book turns out to be a clue to the overall scheme, like lines in a computer program
for some ''killer application'' -- or lines of genetic material in a human chromosome with a deadly effect.

Ghosh paints a rainy, cult-ridden India peopled by, among others, a browbeaten woman reporter; a flouncy socialite; a fearful doyen of letters; a syphilitic sweeper; a spectral, Dickensian signalman; and a hairy, self-made builder (self-made in more ways
than one, perhaps). They are oddly drawn to one another, and to one another's curious manias, by a kismet not all must grasp, for the weird science project depends on people knowing just enough, but not too much. At the end, it's
clear that we, the readers, are also among the unenlightened: the cryptic conclusion seems designed to send us right back to page 1.

Genetic engineering, precognition, shape-shifting, ancient Egyptian mysticism and global mind control are combined here in a strange plot that's worthy of ''The X-Files.'' But the narrative is also a game with narrative itself:
Ghosh's characters are not so much telling the story as being told by it. Their free will has been pre-scripted in a manner akin to that of Borges, but without the playfulness of the great Argentine writer.

Ghosh's tone is more earnest: he seems to be intent on producing a thriller with overtones of profundity. For the most part, he succeeds in presenting a finely carved mystery -- mesmerizing, although a bit rigid. This Rubik's Cube of a novel
seems perfect for dismantling by news groups on the Internet. But some die-hard print lovers may find that it lacks emotional depth. There is no ghost in this machine.

James Saynor is a story editor in the drama department of BBC Television.